Shanghai's History Curriculum Reforms and Shifting Textbook Portrayals of Japan

ABSTRACT: This article examines the coverage of Japan in Shanghai's senior high history textbooks since the early 1990s – a period when the city's status as China's "showpiece for the global era" has been widely touted. Uniquely among cities on the Chinese mainland, Shanghai has throughout this period enjoyed the right to publish and prescribe its own textbooks for use in local schools (a right extended to most other regions only since the early 2000s). The portrayal of Japan in local texts thus offers a window onto the way in which a self-avowedly "global" Chinese metropolis has balanced an outward-looking and internationalist vision with the requirement for history to serve patriotic education. It also sheds light on the meaning and extent of local curricular "autonomy" in contemporary China.

KEYWORDS: Shanghai, China, Japan, history, education, identity, autonomy, war, modernity.